Business Intelligence
Dec 14th, 2006 by John Gerber
I’ll update this post later. I just want to get a few ideas down. I was looking for something, which I don’t even recall what it was now, when I came across Oreon for Nagios. Oreon is a front end providing Nagios with a dashboard. This led me to the idea of open source dashboards, which led me to open source business intelligence systems. I came across Pentaho. While reading about the components of Pentaho, I came across ACEGI and the Eclipse framework. Eclipse has its own Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT). If you look at BIRT, you will come across Callisto. Having tossed all those names (and links), let me provide a additional links with descriptions.
Why is this of interest to me? I like to think of myself as an open source integrator. That might just be because the places I work tend to try and cut costs in terms of software. Many organizations are preferring to put money into support, and cut software costs. Many of the open source companies following this business need have a model that I can understand and appreciate. Another interest of mine is the bridging of business and IT focus. My initial interest was in terms of security and auditing. Reliance on IT in business is growing. As IT takes more of the companies budget, the business is going to need to understand what return on investment they are getting. Enter my interest in business intelligence. Like I said, I am an integrator, whether that be in open source packages, or the integration of IT and business needs.
First, a post from me would not be complete without links to podcasts. From IT Conversations, Steve Lucas, VP for Business Objects, talks on Business Intelligence.
The power of building on open source is that it gives the organization agility. No longer does the vendor control innovation. Software components can be brought together, and replaced if they fail to keep up with the changing market. Let me take an example from an InfoWorld article. You can get Alfresco integrated with Asterisk (VoiceRD from Novacoast) and SugarCRM (CRM) today. Then you can extend this. Add some JasperSoft or Pentaho for Business Intelligence (perhaps reporting capabilities). Some DimDim for web conferencing. Some Zimbra or Scalix for email/collaboration. Want to scale this out on a grid, then there is 3Tera. The Open Source Group has An Open Source Strategy for the Open Group, where they outline, much better then I ever could, why an organization might want to utilize open source software.
Not satisfied? Well here are a OSBI links for more information:
OSBI Links
- Open Source Solutions BI Wiki
- The Open Source Solutions BI wiki will provide research, articles and draft chapters of our book, Open Source Business Intelligence, as they are developed. There are public and private sections of the wiki. For access to the private sections please contact us.
- Open Source Solutions Blog
- This blog provides timely information about open source solutions for business intelligence, collaboration, project managment & data analytics, and expose the process of three authors writing a book collaboratively. Posts range from news & status of OSBI projects, interviews with OSBI project teams and communities’ members, and describing OSS related events.
- Open Source Business Conference
- The Open Source Business Conference was held at San Francisco’s Moscone Center on February 14-15. OSBC East is to be held 2006 October 17-18 in Boston, MA.
- OSBC Wiki
- The Open Source Business Conference has a Wiki on SocialText that supplements the information on the website.
- Business Intelligence for Business People
- This lens by Tom Hudock is a good source of non-technical information about “Business Intelligence (BI), Performance Management, and Data Warehousing (DW)”
Links to OSS BI Suites
- BEE Project
- BEE is one of the first open source BI Suites, having been around since 2002. It provides ETL, ROLAP, reporting, integration with the R Project, is written in PERL, and primarily supports MySQL.
- Bizgres
- Bizgres is a distribution of PostgreSQL with specific modifications to increase performance and use as a data warehouse. In addition, the Bizgres project comes with the KETL ETL tool and JasperReports. The Bizgres project is supported by a consurtium of three companies, Greenplum, Kinetic Networks, and JasperSoft.
- DASH Portal
- MarvelIT’s Dash Portal solution is based on the Apache Jetspeed portal and their unique charting portlets. Using MARVELit DASH, dashboards can be built very easily using the power of SQL and XML.
- Openi
- Openi provides a web-driven interface to OLAP, relational, statistical and data mining sources giving BI integrators user interface, report definition and connector tools.
- Pentaho
- Pentaho has been getting a lot of attention since its launch and funding in 2005. This project has an impressive pedigree in its team leaders, and provides quite an array of capabilities: Reporting, Analysis, Dashboards, Data Mining and Workflow.
- SpagoBI
- SpagoBI is a BI platform drawing its components from the ObjectWeb consurtium. Tools include metadata management, ETL, Reporting, Analysis, and Dashboards.
Links to OSS BI Development Tools
- Eclipse BIRT
- Eclipse is the IDE for Java and J2EE, and BIRT is, basically, its reporting plug-in.
- EFEU
- EFEU is a programming environment to develop C-programs and libraries. It is often pointed to as facilitating the development of ETL and reporting software.
- JpGraph
- JpGraph is an OO Graph drawing library for PHP that is very useful for data visualization and presentation.
- PostgreSQL MDDB
- The linked article describes using EFEU with PostgreSQL to create a multi-dimensional database for use in OLAP.
- If you these are not enough links, go to the Squidoo site where folks pass on recommendations and posted some of the above information.
Today I saw, in our stats, a visitor come to our blog from this site. Thank you for including our lens, wiki and blog covering open source solutions for business intelligence in your list. We hope that you and your readers find them to be useful. We’re currently doing research and plan on adding sections for ESB, data mining and predictive analytics/intelligence as we extend our studies into emerging tools for data management and analytics. Please let us know if we can be of any help, or if there are other, related areas, that might be useful.
I purchased the full VoiceRD integrated appliance from the company. GUI full of bugs and poorly designed interface. LDAP database makes it difficult to operate and gain help from the very active asterisk/trixbox community. There are hardly any active discussions on the company’s wiki and they take for ever to respond to questions. No documentation coupled with no support whatsoever from the company even though I spent thousands on the system. Additionally, they promised 24/7 monitoring/support agreement from Novell but after 4 months of waiting they were unable to provide. If you decide to purchase a complete system from them make sure you test out first, but I would recommend staying away.